Ailsa McFarlane

Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable.

Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of love and life's meanderings. A very gifted writer, I was entranced.

Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never read anything quite like it.

Emma Copley Eisenberg, author of THE THIRD RAINBOW GIRL

I loved Highway Blue - a dark, glimmering, journey deep into modern America on a knife edge between love and dependence.

Hypnotic, stylish, cinematic: Highway Blue holds you captive like a blues song or incantation.

In Highway Blue, the richness and pathos of the ordinary is heightened by the private mysteries of McFarlane's innocent fugitives as they run from both the law and themselves. It is a harrowing journey, but one filled with unexpected kindnesses and the illuminating effect of transformation. I so admire it.

If one of America's many complicated attributes is its ability to let whole lives pass without being seen, Ailsa McFarlane reminds us that language can bring these same lives into stark and penetrating relief. Highway Blue is a road novel, a love story, a coming of age, but with sentences so sharply wrought, characters so achingly precise, that it feels new and fresh and utterly alive.

McFarlane deftly pulls the strings of her cinematic plot, making sure it never descends into melodrama. Instead, the story remains gripping, yet thought-provoking - a poignant comment on the modern condition.

Highway Blue is a beautiful, sun-drenched road novel... A novel that's in love with the idea of America, both contemporary in its concerns and deeply nostalgic

'Holds you captive like a blues song' Olivia Sudjic 
 
In San Padua you can never get the ocean out of your brain. 
 
Anne Marie's husband Cal left her on their first anniversary. Two years later and she is still adrift, living a precarious life of shift work and shared apartments. 
 
When he shows up on the doorstep, clearly in trouble, she reluctantly agrees to a drink. But later that night a gun goes off in an alley near the shore and the young couple flee together, crammed into a beat-up car with their broken past, desperate to fill their lives on this long stretch of road under hot skies. 
 
______________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR HIGHWAY BLUE 
'Poignant, moving and cinematic' An Yu 
'Beautiful' Observer 
'Unforgettable' Elaine Feeney 
'Gripping' Stylist

Ailsa McFarlane

Praise for Highway Blue

Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable.

Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of lo ...

Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never rea ...

Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable.

Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of lo ...

Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never rea ...

Poignant, moving, and cinematic, this is a story imbued with love and loss that feels at once distantly dreamlike and vividly recognisable.

Highway Blue is a beautiful, inspired rendering of the on-the-road journey. At its core is an unforgettable protagonist in Anne Marie. McFarlane has written an irresistible story of lo ...

Ailsa McFarlane's prose combines the razor sharp truth telling of Ottessa Moshfegh with the troubled heart of Raymond Carver, using plain language to conjure a shockingly intense way of seeing. I've never rea ...

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